by Lisa Chaney
Gabrielle’s new partnership was a twentieth-century corporation in embryo, and the commodity being sold was, essentially, Gabrielle. But while on the one hand proud of it, on the other, she would also remain ambivalent about being one of the founders of the twentieth century and all that its democratic, mechanized and merchandising possibilities eventually brought about. As the woman who, more than any other, would make fashion possible for millions of other women across the world, Gabrielle experienced the dilemma of being deeply individualistic in the first age of mass culture and mass consumption.
How could the skilled craftsmen and women who had made buttons, braids, ribbons and lace, and woven beautiful textiles of all kinds by hand, and Gabrielle’s premières, who used these things in their painstaking handiwork, compete with the speed and the cheapness of the mechanization of almost every conceivable task? Gabrielle’s was an empire that, by the time she died, would have become a corporate one, and that, in the years since her death, has developed into something representative of truly modern times: a global corporation. Gabrielle’s name has become a corporate identity.
In the course of 1924, Ernest Beaux developed another perfume for Gabrielle. They called it Cuir de Russie. Two years later, this was followed by Bois des Iles and, in 1927, another one, Gardénia, was being promoted. Yet despite the Wertheimers’ publicity department promotions, the success of these perfumes would be nothing compared to Chanel № 5. Even taking into account the fact that the lion’s share of the profits went to the Wertheimers, by far the largest part of Gabrielle’s wealth would soon depend upon this one perfume. Over the years, the company the Wertheimers named Les Parfums Chanel would promote Gabrielle’s perfume with a publicity campaign of increasing sophistication. Here, like Gabrielle, the prodigy Raymond Radiguet had shown his flair for the spirit of the age when he prophesied, “I speak of advertising… In publicity, more than anywhere else, I see the future of the sublime, so threatened in modern poetry.”
During the war, the material damage sustained by France had been staggering. But afterward, while there wasn’t an economic revolution, new activities, such as car production, helped boost the economy, and during the twenties, life for many carried on improving. At the same time, the structure of mainstream French society, and its attitudes, remained effectively the same. What needed to change? There was a boom. And as part of postwar “reconstruction,” a traditionalist and government drive called for the preservation of home and hearth, and for women to have more babies.
The New Woman, however, was becoming more conspicuous, spent less time by the French hearth and was producing alarmingly fewer babies. Not only was she infiltrating previously male preserves, but by the midtwenties, at least, she was also wearing versions of Gabrielle’s straight-up-and-down dresses, camouflaging bosom and hips and cutting off her hair. This way she earned for herself the sobriquet la garçonne; in the English-speaking world, she became the “flapper.”
In 1922, Victor Margueritte’s racy, bestselling novel La garçonne, from which the above name derived — introduced a modern young woman personifying the social, intellectual and technological changes now beginning to shape bourgeois urban life. Projected in the mass media leading an entirely altered life, the “emancipated” woman drove motor cars, flew planes and was a dashing young thing entirely in control of her life. Attractive, self-assured, often quite aggressive, she was also independent and out for adventure. Always on the move, she traveled unescorted and succeeded in some newly invented career. Slicking down her short hair, she smoked, wore trousers, and even men’s suits. And while ambiguity of all kinds became a highly visible aspect of society, the majority of those women dressing in confrontational ways were actually only practicing a “visual language of liberation” rather than the real thing.
For most, “emancipation” meant little more than what they did with their appearance. It was only a small number of women, like Gabrielle, whose lives really were entirely altered. In Paris, these included Colette; the fashionable bisexual painter Tamara de Lempicka, who sniffed her cocaine with the likes of André Gide; the shipping-line heiress Nancy Cunard, who knew Gabrielle, wore Chanel and outraged her class, not by the drugs she used but by her cropped hair, her men’s suits and her cohabitation with a black lover. Then there was the bisexual Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein and the black American dancer Josephine Baker, whose erotic and challenging female persona took Paris by storm in 1925.
If in reality, however, the scope for most French women had expanded little, in essence, what they wore was announcing to their menfolk, “I am your equal.” A popular song from the twenties articulates well the anxieties these loosened boundaries were provoking:
Hey, hey, women are going mad today;
Hey, hey, fellers are just as bad, I’ll say.
Masculine women, feminine men,
Which is the rooster, which is the hen?
It’s hard to tell ’em apart today, hey, hey.
Victor Margueritte described the heroine of his La garçonne, Monique Lerbier, as the incarnation of “woman’s right to sexual equality in love,” and her premarital erotic encounters, including those with women, provoked a public outcry. Margueritte saw bobbed hair as “a symbol of independence, if not power.”10 Meanwhile, Antoine, the Parisian hairdresser who was a pioneer of the short haircut, joked that in creating the bob, he had avenged Samson by depriving Delilah of her hair and hence her power to charm men. Discussion and argument raged back and forth, fathers disowned short-haired daughters, and there was more than one case of murder. The socialite Boni de Castellane complained that “women no longer exist; all that’s left are the boys created by Chanel.”
Yet in this age of confusion, Gabrielle herself believed she was in less doubt about what it was she was doing. Confident in her femininity, she didn’t feel she was in competition with men. What she wanted was scope to act equally. This of course involved competition but, for her, it didn’t mean trying to become the same. In years to come, she would make one of her breathtakingly dismissive statements reinforcing this attitude: “Women who want to look like men, men who want to look like women are both failures.”
The stereotype of the flapper was that of an apolitical consumer, hell-bent on having a good time. A number of recent historians have seen Gabrielle and her kind as part of an emergent modern consumerism exploiting women in the pursuit of profit.11 Although this is far too simplistic, “emancipation” was indeed at times rather illusory. In 1923, Vogue described the hours “one poor woman” spent at the gym and the masseuse, and the pills and “rubber girdles” used to attain “an ideal shape.” Another article would say “how seductive is the straight line of our winter dresses, how revealing of the sveltnesse of the female silhouette,” but then admitted that this was pretty much impossible to acquire without some kind of corset: “There was no other way of achieving the desired silhouette.”
One honest contemporary writer declared that there was a “tyranny of liberty in current fashion” because of the desperate measures to which women were driven, and that “the effect of extreme elegance… hardly leads someone to suspect it took two hours to achieve, so much is dependent on the triumphant appearance of simplicity.” 12 This could well be a description of the amount of time we know Gabrielle took over her own preparations to dress. Our commentator did, however, also say that if contemporary dress was an “illusion of freedom,” freedom was in fact the objective of the new look. But if a woman’s bobbed hair and short dresses were not as “liberating” as they were made out to be, and many women’s lives were most unliberated, why did young women take to these fashions with such enthusiasm?
Perhaps the answer lies in the idea that in appearing liberated through what one wore, it gradually became a genuine aspect of personal emancipation. Wearing short hair and short dresses, women were able to project a fantasy of their ideal, liberated selves moving freely in society. Appearing thus liberated, they gave the idea a certain political power and did pro
voke a public outcry. The appearance of the flapper represented a visual image of personal freedom. Wearing the clothes promoted by Gabrielle, women embraced what had become part of the meaning of fashion, throwing off their previous constraints.
Wearing the new fashions — copies of Gabrielle’s fashions — kept the idea of female identity in the forefront of people’s minds. While the debate in France was intensely political, women’s short hair and short dresses became central to the cultural mythology of the whole era. Provoking outrage, frustration, envy and admiration, the way Gabrielle and her followers looked provided a powerful visual language for the upheaval and change that everyone saw around them.13 And while, for most women, their clothes were as yet a fantasy of liberation, fashion itself was a powerful language of signs, heralding the arrival of a new world.
While Gabrielle’s dresses may have been decorated, they were also not much more than sheaths, where any sign of the waist was long gone. Hips and busts were effectively banished, and those corsets must indeed have been in demand. Waists were firmly tethered to the hip; at the most, women’s designs were only semifitted, and Gabrielle’s particularly versatile sporty looks were ever more popular and much copied. Vogue would write that her “dresses, which met the needs of the time so well and which made those who were wearing them look so young, earned their creator worldwide fame.”14
Perhaps the most legendary of Gabrielle’s designs was the one known as the little black dress. It was described as “little” because it was discreet. Quite how it came about is unclear, but Gabrielle’s own version of events was told later. One evening in 1920 she was at the theater. Looking at the women all around her in their flashy, gaudy colors, she said she was driven to say to her companion, “These colors are impossible. These women, I’m bloody well going to dress them in black! So I imposed black… Black wipes out everything else around it. I used to tolerate colors, but I treated them as monochrome masses. The French don’t have a sense of blocks of color.”15
Forestalling the criticism of these ideas, Gabrielle said that it was wrong to think that dressing women in black removed all originality from them. Rather, she believed that dressing alike apparently helped reveal women’s individuality. While wearing black earlier herself, in her 1926 collections Gabrielle introduced a number of utterly simple day dresses, all in black. A color traditionally used for uniforms of various kinds, or during periods of mourning, black was on the whole considered unseemly if worn by women on other occasions. But Gabrielle had already made long and beautiful black evening dresses at least as early as 1917.
Now she reinterpreted and restyled the color in the most elegantly spare shapes. She was the first to show black dresses to be worn at any time of day or night, and later said, “Before me no one would have dared to dress in black.” For daytime, the dresses were in wool or Moroccan crepe; for evening, they were in luxurious materials, such as silk crepe, satin and velvet. While their basic structure remained deceptively simple, they were counterbalanced by decoration, such as jeweled and rhinestone-decorated belts or white collars, cuffs and much jewelry. Sometimes Gabrielle used the striking flourish of a white camellia — made from various materials — pinned against a black dress. (Eventually, she loved to have them pinned in the hair.)
While Gabrielle’s black designs were to become universally adopted, the initial response to their elegant economy of line was not unanimously positive. American Vogue, however, correctly predicted that the little black dress would become “a sort of uniform for all modern women of taste.” Its very “simplicity” would overcome the fear women had hitherto labored under, of being seen in the same dress as another woman, reflecting an essential element of Gabrielle’s whole outlook: a woman in a black dress draws attention as much to herself as to her dress. American Vogue had immediately grasped Gabrielle’s message and, in the editorial, made the famous comment that these dresses were like the black, mass-produced Ford motor cars. By implication, they would become standard wear for the masses. A detail of that season was Gabrielle’s addition of cloche hats. They may at first have been criticized by the likes of her friend Sem—“They are nothing but plain tea strainers in soft felt, into which women plunge their heads… everything disappears, swallowed up by that elastic pocket”—but these “tea strainers’ quickly became the rage.
Gabrielle would say that women had previously thought “of every color, except the absence of color.” And though declaring that “nothing is more difficult to make than a little black dress,” and that the tricks of the exotic are much easier, she was the first in her day to fully recognize that black and white have what she described as an “absolute beauty… dress women in white or black at a ball: they are the only ones you see.”16
While Gabrielle has a reputation for having resented the upper classes, from the twenties onward she began to employ them. In the future she would say, “I have employed society people, not to indulge my vanity, or to humiliate them (I would take other forms of revenge should I be seeking that), but… because they were useful to me.”17 She maintained that through the rich seam of contacts available to families with any lineage, she was kept abreast of things without having to be present at every social event. From observation and hard personal experience, Gabrielle had become tougher and did indeed have little respect for a good many of those with great privilege. And, to be sure, her aristocratic employees were useful to her, as emissaries and ambassadors for Chanel. Tapping into the prevalence for snobbery, especially among her clients, Gabrielle was well aware that the presence of the old European aristocracy as her employees added to the air of exclusiveness in her salons. This would have been virtually impossible before the war, when a couturier was not “received” in society. But times had changed and many were obliged to work who had previously hardly known the meaning of the word.
In tough mode, Gabrielle said, “When I took smart friends on a trip, I always paid, because society people become amusing and delightful when they are certain they won’t have to pay for their pleasure. I purchased, in short, their good humor.” At the same time, she said she found them “irresistibly dishonest” and in her idiosyncratic way, had a genuine sympathy for their impoverished gentility. Gabrielle’s bravado act often omitted the fact that she not only helped a number of those with distinguished lineages, but also found them sympathetic.
Although Gabrielle was born a peasant, her own nature was in many ways a patrician one, and she identified with certain traits associated with the upper classes: “Yes, society people amuse me more than the others. They have wit, tact, a charming disloyalty, a well-bred nonchalance, and an arrogance that is very specific, very caustic, always on the alert; they know how to arrive at the right time and to leave when necessary.”18 (Whatever ambivalence Gabrielle might have felt about this section of society was far outweighed by her deep antipathy to the bourgeoisie. She regarded their traditional small-mindedness as loathsome.)
The many aristocratic Russian émigrés as well as eastern Europeans and the odd upper-class French and Anglo-Saxon employed by Gabrielle were people virtually unemployable elsewhere, and the Chanel salons became a refuge for a good number of them. Here, if the well born were prepared to turn their hand to commerce, they could also maintain their dignity. In Gabrielle’s own way, she esteemed them, in particular, the Russians. The pianist Arthur Rubinstein recalled the sad story of a grand Russian woman fallen on hard times; part of her family had been shot by the Bolsheviks. She desperately needed work, and Gabrielle employed her.19 An old retainer at Gabrielle’s nephew’s château remembered Gabrielle taking in a bankrupt elderly Russian countess: “Mademoiselle had told us to… put back in the old lady’s little box the cents she had saved with great effort, and which she would give to us as tips. We had been ordered to let the countess believe that we kept the money in order not to hurt her feelings.”20
Now that some of the most distinguished and trendsetting European and American women were Gabrielle’s clients, the socially prom
inent, utterly fashionable and supremely self-important writer Princess Marthe Bibesco was regularly to be seen wearing Chanel couture. She even had Gabrielle design a wardrobe especially for her airplane travel. Gabrielle may have “worked” for Marthe Bibesco, but her own renown was now such that Bibesco gave a thinly veiled portrait of Gabrielle — albeit ironic and patronizing — in one of her fashionable novels. The couturier became Tote, an autocrat of fashion who
drains the wealth of about ten capitals and of at least three continents… All the women who wear Tote sweaters, her flower [the gardenia], her dress or her striped scarf, have twins and would recognize their lookalikes in New York, London, Rome or Buenos Aires… Tote’s bicolor scarf had made them coreligionists…
One could say that civilization starts and ends with Tote’s customers. Isn’t the product that she exchanges for the most solid currencies in the world quite simply her intelligence? The precious matter, the imponderable, inexhaustible, and forever renewed, with which she floods the world’s markets every six months.21
Gabrielle was a master of the developing art of advertising, and she capitalized on an updated form of self-promotion initiated by the sharper couturiers before the war. The great courtesans and actresses, then the leaders of fashion, had sported both their charms and the couturiers’ new clothes at the races, that most prominent of social platforms. But with the demise of the great courtesans, society women were now fashion’s foremost promoters.
Once again bearing in mind the inordinate vanity of most of her clients, Gabrielle presented a dress here, another one there, to a financially reduced young woman of good family. This publicity was multiplied when Gabrielle invited some of these same young women to act as her mannequins. At one time or another, a number of Gabrielle’s friends — for example, Misia Sert — were also to be found on the list of employees at the rue Cambon. Among her other duties, Misia was a saleswoman — Gabrielle had often witnessed her formidable efforts as agent on her husband’s behalf. Misia was also sometimes a Chanel model, her name good for publicity.